Bracket Blog

​Hello hoop fans. Now that the college football season is over, a lot of attention will be focused on college basketball. In recent years, bracketology, the science of predicting the bracket has become more mainstream. We here at Delphi Bracketology have been involved for the last four years.

The process that the NCAA uses is not a clear cut process. Each year a committee of athletic administrators is assigned the task of watching games and evaluating data. This data consists of wins and losses and ratings formulas. Bracketology thus, tries to replicate this committee.

Delphi Bracketology is a group of 11 students and 4 teachers who meet each week to discuss and work on predicting the bracket. We use the following procedures to make our selections.

1. Each week we start from scratch- comparing teams data as it stands currentlyWe do not attempt to predict any future results. We operate on a snap shot mentality. If the bracket were formed today what would it look like.

2. We download RPI data to a spreadsheet for sorting

3. We evaluate the following criteria A. Overall record and RPI ranking- We only consider teams in top 100 RPI B. Tier 1 wins ( use to be top 50 RPI, now is RPI wins based on location of games) C. Tier 2 wins D. Tier 3 & 4 losses- bad losses E. Strength of Schedule F. KenPom rating and other mathematical formulas

4. We select the 32 conference leaders as the automatic qualifiers. Then select the 36 at large teams

5. Teams are compared to each other and ranked 1-68. After ranking we then "scrub" teams. We compare team 12 to team 13 by looking deeper at the quality of wins.

A win or a loss in a particular game may or may not affect seeding. It depends on what happens to other teams as well. Another important note is that RPI changes daily and what is a good win one week may change the next week due to changes in the RPI.

This is a quick explanation of how our group selects the teams for seeding. We have had some success in the last two years in the bracketmatrix.com competition, finishing 1st in 2016 and 14th in 2017 out of over 150 entrants.

We are sure that our followers may have questions or complaints. We will be glad to discuss on twitter @delphibrackets. Happy college hoops season. May your team be seeded well